Latifah calls on hip-hop to clean up lyrics
Queen Latifah has become the latest hip-hop artist to urge her peers to tone down their language, insisting black rappers should show off their vocabulary instead of rhyming expletives.
The rapper-turned-actress has called for hip-hop to start policing itself - to make sure the stereotype of uneducated, thuggish stars disappears.
She says: "We should start encouraging people to clean certain songs up because it's just not necessary.
"When you get used to hearing the clean version of a song in the clubs or on the radio all the time and then you hear the explicit version, it's shocking and it's not very creative.
"If you could clean up this record and make it sound this good, why did you ever need to make it like that in the first place? Sometimes cursing is an excuse not to use more vocabulary."
